Microsoft volume licensing site serves up customer details

Let's turn on the juice and see what shakes loose

In December Microsoft decided to altogether shut down its volume licensing website, while the company gave the portal a makeover.

At the time many complained about the more than week-long outage and rightly wondered why such a huge tech beast couldn’t work in tandem between old and new without bringing the system offline completely.

Redmond clearly disagreed and instead shuttered its eOpen licence and volume licensing service sites on 7 December. Microsoft apologised to customers affected by the scheduled outage, and the overhauled portal flickered back to business as (sort of) usual a few days before Christmas.

But the story didn’t end there - many of Microsoft’s customers and partners continued to gripe about the vendor's volume licensing site, because it was locking many users out of the system due to a registration error.

"In standard systems testing, we encountered an issue with the registration system. While the vast majority of partners and customers are able to access the system, there remain some issues that are causing difficulties for some and it has taken us longer than expected to correct these issues," the company told us in January.

Microsoft said back then that it was scurrying to fix that problem, but didn't offer a timescale on when the site might work for everyone.

"We understand the inconvenience that this causes and greatly value doing business with our partners and customers," it said.

And - as of today - Microsoft has so far greeted the latest VLSC snafu with silence.

“I had created access to the site for myself through our initial account that we had setup for our agreement,” Simon told El Reg.

“I had given myself full access to everything that I could under that account. I have emailed Microsoft but it is going to an American run email and is probably in a huge queue of emails. I certainly didn’t do anything unusual when setting up the account. My liveid has been around for years too.”

We pointed out to Microsoft that it was reasonable for customers to expect the software multinational to have ironed out all the creases in its overhauled system by now.

After all, while one might expect teething problems when a company revamps its service, Microsoft's growing list of VLSC problems don't look set to be fixed anytime soon. Come on Redmond, what's gone wrong? ®